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Salary: USD 150,000 - 400,000 / annual
Etched is building hardware for frontier AI inference, co-designing chips, racks, software, and manufacturing. The Internal Acceleration team's mandate is to build AI agents that accelerate the production of frontier tokens and transform how hardware is built in an AI-native world.
In this role, you'll work directly with founders and embed with teams building kernels, ASICs, hardware, production, and special projects. You'll develop agentic harnesses and operating systems that measurably speed up Etched's engineering velocity. Success is measured by how much faster the company moves, not lines of code written.
You'll identify and own high-leverage bottlenecks across engineering teams, building and deploying LLM agents wired into workflows via tool-calling and MCP protocols. You'll ship full-stack internal products from zero to one—interfaces, data pipelines, and infrastructure that define how Etched builds. You'll design evals and track adoption metrics to double down on tools that matter and kill those that don't. You'll also take on special projects directly with founders, surfacing cross-company problems and driving critical milestones.
This is a role for engineers who thrive on ambiguity, have strong product sense, and want to own problems end-to-end. The team is fully in-person at Santana Row in San Jose and values engineering skills highly. There are no boundaries between engineering and research; all technical staff contribute to both and work across disciplines. This role will not be a 9-to-5; the ideal candidate is excited about high intensity and ownership.
Benefits include medical, dental, and vision with generous coverage ($500/month credit for waiving medical), $2,500/month housing subsidy for those within walking distance of the office, relocation support, wellness benefits, daily lunch and dinner, and unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 1–5+ years of experience building and shipping software end-to-end, ideally at a fast-moving startup
- Strong full-stack skills; ability to ship working products across the stack
- Experience building LLM agents or AI tooling that real users depend on (beyond API calls): context engineering, tool integration, evals, failure analysis
- Use AI to ramp fast on unfamiliar domains; agentic coding tools and frontier models are your working tools, not add-ons
- Product sense, design taste, and extreme attention to detail
- Extreme agency: you find the real problem, not just the stated one
STRONG ADDITIONAL QUALIFICATIONS:
- Exposure to chip development, kernels, hardware, or manufacturing
- Infrastructure, data engineering, or DevOps experience
- Fine-tuning, RAG over proprietary technical data, or multi-agent orchestration
- Startup experience, especially through hypergrowth
